Ivanka speaks at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in DC on October 9th.

By Paul Morigi/Getty Images.

On Monday evening, Ivanka Trump took the stage at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit, in Washington D.C., her adopted hometown. During her brief tenure as a White House adviser, Ivanka has had an uncomfortable time accumulating credibility at similar high-level networking events. In April, at the G20 Summit in Berlin, the moderator of her panel greeted her with a dismissive question about how she managed her various priorities. “What is your role,” the moderator queried, “and who are you representing: your father as president of the United States, the American people, or your business?” Members of the audience groaned when she discussed her father’s attitudes toward paid family leave. “You hear the reaction from the audience,” the moderator interrupted, using their audible disdain as a springboard into another question about her father’s treatment of women.

This week in D.C., however, Ivanka received the sort of light touch, high-gloss treatment that she may have grown accustomed to during her years as a Trump kid, entrepreneur, and executive at the Trump Organization. The moderator began the panel by asking the audience members to raise their hands in order to show how many of them have been in touch with “Ivanka and her team” on issues pertaining to her self-appointed West Wing portfolio—the intersection of workforce development and apprenticeship programs, educational goals, and family-leave policies. By my count, more than a dozen women raised their hands. Thereafter, Ivanka confidently articulated her role as a bipartisan facilitator of sorts. “I view my role in this as convening and trying to get people to talk, bring people to the table, expose this issue to people who haven’t previously thought or considered it and hopefully make progress,” she told the audience in D.C. on Monday.

Over the past couple of weeks, Ivanka Trump, branding impresario, has been steadily working away at a full-scale reinvention. After a difficult first few months in Washington in which the administration was almost too chaotic for any real initiatives to take hold, Ivanka appears to be segueing to an advocacy role—one more in line with the duties of a committed First Family member than a White House senior adviser. Last week, she traveled to a marine base in North Carolina to speak on a panel about opportunities for military spouses in the workforce. Previously, she talked science with middle-schoolers in Detroit after the administration announced a $200 million commitment to STEM education for kindergarten through twelfth grade. This past weekend, Axios reported that, hungry for a bipartisan win, for months, she and her husband, senior adviser to the president Jared Kushner, have been hosting a series of dinners at their Kalorama home for which they have invited Republican and Democratic lawmakers on a variety of policy issues. One such dinner, last Tuesday night, focused on criminal-justice reform and brought in Republican Senator Mike Lee and Democrats Dick Durbin, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Amy Klobuchar, who spoke on stage at the Fortune conference just before Ivanka did on Monday.

Video: The Stakes are Too High for the Trump Presidency to be Funny

She plans to host two more dinners with lawmakers at her home in the coming weeks—one on Wednesday evening and one the following week—to talk about the expanded child tax credit she has pushed in her father’s tax-reform plan, according to a new report from Politico. Last month, a White House official told me that Ivanka and members of the Office of Legislative Affairs met with members of the Ways and Means Committee to discuss the child tax credit, and the following day, she was invited to have lunch with Senator Lamar Alexander at a Senate office building to discuss the tax credit and paid-family leave. On Monday, Politico noted that she is “staking her reputation in Washington” on the issue, making private calls to Republican leaders, meeting with groups from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to Americans for Tax Reform, and G.O.P. lawmakers like Marco Rubio and Mark Meadows and Democratic representative John Larson.

“We’ve been deeply committed to helping parents afford the costs of raising and caring for their children since the early days of the administration,” she said in a statement, “and will continue to advocate for relief for American families in the coming weeks.”

As a White House official told me last week, the early months of the Trump administration was a Wild West in which policies and initiatives were subsumed by bickering and disorganization. There was no real structure in place and there was a dearth of leadership at the top; infighting amongst various factions derailed just about everything and President Donald Trump’s tweets frustrated just about everyone; a Republican-majority Congress couldn’t pass health-care reform and courts blocked his executive order banning immigrants from Muslim-majority countries; and the investigation into the Trump campaign’s involvement in Russia’s attempt to meddle in the 2016 presidential election wafted through the West Wing.

In those early days, the White House official told me, many key staffers and administration officials, including Ivanka and Kushner, felt like they needed to be in every meeting in order to protect the president, even if it fell outside their purview. The couple was at the table, and may have contributed to crucial thinking, in some of the biggest presidential whiffs of Trump’s first few months in office, including his decision to fire former F.B.I. director James Comey (a decision which Kushner supported), the choice to pull out of the Paris climate accord (which a source close to the couple told me at the time they had urged him not to do, to no avail), and the immigration ban (which, again, Kushner supported). Their most significant impact, however, was in matters of personnel. This summer, they helped engineer a plan to oust former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus by advocating hiring Anthony Scaramucci, a Priebus adversary. Within Scaramucci’s first 10 days in office, both he and Priebus were out, and within weeks, Steve Bannon, another White House foe of theirs, got the boot, too. They were “thrilled” when General John Kelly took the chief of staff job, the White House official told me, because it would impose enough structure that they could stop focusing on daily catastrophes and instead zero in on what they came to Washington to do.

Ivanka attends a listening session with military spouses at the White House on August 2nd.

By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Kelly’s ascendance has allowed the Trump-Kushners to begin to focus on a narrower array of issues, from education for women to criminal-justice reform, and to burnish contacts that could certainly benefit them significantly when they return to the private sector. The pair, after all, are not only meeting with many influential lawmakers, but have been talking infrastructure, workforce programs, jobs of the future and private partnerships with many top American executives. Being in the trenches with both public and private power players is exactly why White House jobs are so sought-after in the first place. There will be a life after the White House for the two thirtysomething real-estate scions, and effecting any kind of change on these issues, it is assumed, will set them up for further success.

But it is unclear whether they will actually be able to gain traction on some of the problems they set out to solve. Kushner, for instance, has been spending recent weeks focused on Middle East peace—a holy grail of U.S. diplomacy that remains as elusive as ever. Ivanka has been expending her capital on a tax reform process that may very well collapse. Her father, after all, has spent the last several days attacking Senator Bob Corker, whose vote he will need to pass the legislation. The administration has yet to offer real, fleshed-out specifics about its plans, and it faces real roadblocks in explaining how tax cuts will benefit lower- and middle-income families rather than Trump’s rich friends and fellow businessmen.

But oftentimes for the Trumps, optics matter more than substance. Attaching herself to a full push for childcare tax credits, even if she knows it faces the real possibility of failure, is a way for Ivanka to show that she fully committed herself on an issue she ultimately had little control over. If it passes and includes some version of what she’s advocating for, it’s a feather in her cap; if the whole reform fails, it doesn’t fall on her shoulders.

Her role, as she explained it on Monday, is to convene, to facilitate, to expose people to an issue. Progress, she said, was the hope. In a family business, heirs and heiresses often live in a world in which trying hard often matters just as much. And in the most nepotistic West Wing in history, deliverables for the First Daughter and White House adviser are an additive, not a necessity.

Her Second Desk

There is no official Trump family creed, at least one that is publicly known, but it could be something like: what’s dad’s is ours and again, what’s dad’s is ours. That, apparently, includes the desk in the Oval Office, which Ivanka has kept warm on multiple occasions, including this phone call with the astronaut who broke the record for the longest stay aboard the International Space Station.

Photo: Pool

Merk Perk

Before Ivanka Trump even had an official title, a security clearance, or a West Wing office (in fact, she was still denying that she would be a government employee at this point), she still managed to score a spot directly next to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on her visit to the White House in March. We’ll call it an unofficial official work perk.

Photo: Pool

A Berlin Chill

There was an elected head of state, a head of the International Monetary Fund, a foreign minister, and a real live queen on stage at the W20 summit in Berlin in April. Ivanka Trump was there, too, after her former seat-mate Merkel invited her to join. But even the panel’s moderator was unsure of why she was there—asking her to clarify whether she was representing the interests of the U.S., her father, or her business. Members of the crowd later groaned when she highlighted her father’s support of women in business.

Photo: Sean Gallup

Thirsty at G20

Some 24 decades ago, America signed its Declaration of Independence to form a nation free of of a monarchy. So it rubbed people the wrong way when the president's eldest daughter took her father's seat at the G20 this summer in Germany when alongside other world leaders. While it is common for heads of state to take breaks, typically their seats are warmed by people who do not share their D.N.A. Perhaps Rex Tillerson would have been a safer choice.

Photo: NurPhoto

World Leader Next Door

The way in which Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau carries himself like diplomatic Disney Prince makes him easy to watch. And that is exactly what Ivanka Trump did when the two sat next to each other in the Roosevelt Room at the White House earlier this year in a meeting about entrepreneurship. What was discussed at said meeting got overshadowed by photographs snapped of the First Daughter eyeing Canada’s First Man. Weeks later, she took another seat next to him, that time, at a Broadway show in New York, at which Ivanka was his guest.

Photo: SHAWN THEW/EPA/REX/Shutterstock

North Korea

Many people questioned the fiery language President Donald Trump used in describing his reaction to North Korea while on his summer vacation in Bedminster, New Jersey earlier this month. He doubled down when a reporter asked him what he meant by his tweet in which he said the U.S. was “locked and loaded” to respond to a Pyongyang provocation. “If [King Jong Un] utters one threat in a form of an overt threat…he will truly regret it and he will regret it fast,” he responded. The only thing more upending than these comments was the fact that he was giving them while his daughter was seated at the table with him, in the frame, as cameras rolled. It was supposed to be a workforce development meeting, after all, and that is on her White House slate. Perhaps this is why First Daughters don’t typically work in official capacities in the White House.

Photo: Jonathan Ernst

The Ultimate Chair

Putin’s chair in his Kremlin office? Impressive. The Resolute Desk in the Oval? Historic. To Merkel’s left and Trudeau’s good side and the G20 stage? That’s all any ambitious 35-year-old could dream of. But even at an early age, long before the White House was in view, Ivanka Trump knew the best seat—the one that would get her more in life than anything else—was closer to home.

Photo: Ron Galella, Ltd.

Her Second Desk

There is no official Trump family creed, at least one that is publicly known, but it could be something like: what’s dad’s is ours and again, what’s dad’s is ours. That, apparently, includes the desk in the Oval Office, which Ivanka has kept warm on multiple occasions, including this phone call with the astronaut who broke the record for the longest stay aboard the International Space Station.

Pool

Merk Perk

Before Ivanka Trump even had an official title, a security clearance, or a West Wing office (in fact, she was still denying that she would be a government employee at this point), she still managed to score a spot directly next to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on her visit to the White House in March. We’ll call it an unofficial official work perk.

Pool

A Berlin Chill

There was an elected head of state, a head of the International Monetary Fund, a foreign minister, and a real live queen on stage at the W20 summit in Berlin in April. Ivanka Trump was there, too, after her former seat-mate Merkel invited her to join. But even the panel’s moderator was unsure of why she was there—asking her to clarify whether she was representing the interests of the U.S., her father, or her business. Members of the crowd later groaned when she highlighted her father’s support of women in business.

Sean Gallup

Thirsty at G20

Some 24 decades ago, America signed its Declaration of Independence to form a nation free of of a monarchy. So it rubbed people the wrong way when the president's eldest daughter took her father's seat at the G20 this summer in Germany when alongside other world leaders. While it is common for heads of state to take breaks, typically their seats are warmed by people who do not share their D.N.A. Perhaps Rex Tillerson would have been a safer choice.

NurPhoto

World Leader Next Door

The way in which Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau carries himself like diplomatic Disney Prince makes him easy to watch. And that is exactly what Ivanka Trump did when the two sat next to each other in the Roosevelt Room at the White House earlier this year in a meeting about entrepreneurship. What was discussed at said meeting got overshadowed by photographs snapped of the First Daughter eyeing Canada’s First Man. Weeks later, she took another seat next to him, that time, at a Broadway show in New York, at which Ivanka was his guest.

SHAWN THEW/EPA/REX/Shutterstock

North Korea

Many people questioned the fiery language President Donald Trump used in describing his reaction to North Korea while on his summer vacation in Bedminster, New Jersey earlier this month. He doubled down when a reporter asked him what he meant by his tweet in which he said the U.S. was “locked and loaded” to respond to a Pyongyang provocation. “If [King Jong Un] utters one threat in a form of an overt threat…he will truly regret it and he will regret it fast,” he responded. The only thing more upending than these comments was the fact that he was giving them while his daughter was seated at the table with him, in the frame, as cameras rolled. It was supposed to be a workforce development meeting, after all, and that is on her White House slate. Perhaps this is why First Daughters don’t typically work in official capacities in the White House.

Jonathan Ernst

The Ultimate Chair

Putin’s chair in his Kremlin office? Impressive. The Resolute Desk in the Oval? Historic. To Merkel’s left and Trudeau’s good side and the G20 stage? That’s all any ambitious 35-year-old could dream of. But even at an early age, long before the White House was in view, Ivanka Trump knew the best seat—the one that would get her more in life than anything else—was closer to home.